Capsule Reviews of Expensive Restaurants (from a vegetarian perspective)

I promise that this isn’t going to turn into an annoying foodie blog. It’s just that my life has been consumed lately with matters that can’t be blogged about, like a search. But one of the plus sides of interviewing job candidates is the opportunity to go out to expensive restaurants that I might not otherwise frequent — with candidates and colleagues. Of course, I present an additional challenge for such places, since they are usually pretty meaty. Most of the good veggie stuff is a step or two down in terms of price, which suits me fine. The deal with all of these places is that at the time of booking a reservation, they were notified a vegetarian was coming and had affirmed that they were willing to accommodate a vegetarian.

Here’s a ranked review of 5 places we went over the last month or two:

1. La Montée du Lait. 4 plates, $44 dollars. Mix and match from appetizers, salads, mains and desserts. Each course comes with a matched wine. Of course that more than doubles the price of the meal. There were just enough veggie options on the menu to pull it off and they said that if I didn’t see anything I wanted on the menu, they would “come up with something else for me.” The food was beautifully presented and delectable with just a touch of molecular gastronomy flourish. Everyone at the table was delighted, and even though I’m not a big pair-your-wine-with-your-food kind of guy, they really know what they’re doing here. Now at the top of my Montreal fine dining line.

2. Chez l’Epicier. They used to be #1 on my list, and haven’t slipped at all; it’s just that La Montée is slight more amazing. Usually I had to request a special veggie dish ahead of time for a main course but this time they actually had a “fennel this way and that” dish and did quite nicely. They are perhaps a bit more avant-garde in presentation and in their use of molecular gastronomy techniques (my colleague’s “shrimp foam” was not entirely a hit but you’ve got to give them an A for effort). My amuse bouche was the conversation piece of the night. It was a cherry tomato encrusted with something tasty and stuck on the end of an eye dropper (for dramatic effect my colleagues prefer to call it a “syringe” — I can assure you that I’m not putting syringes in my mouth). Anyway, you eat the tomato and then squirt the contents of the syringe in your mouth. There was some combination of truffle oil and vinegar and the taste sensation is quite intense. I loved it, my colleagues laughed. It was totally worth it. Definitely a dining experience as much as it is a meal.

3. Cafe Ferreira. Basically, Portuguese is a cuisine to be avoided by vegetarians because at least as its prepared here, it’s mostly meat and fish dishes. However, this place, knowing their clientele, has come up with a main dish pasta that looked pretty good. Luckily I asked the server if they had anything else and the chef came up with a wonderful risotto that wasn’t on the menu and wasn’t like any other risotto I’ve had. I told them it should be on the menu. My colleagues absolutely loved the place. UPDATE: I went back with Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler when they were in town and got the porcini pasta. OMGWTFBBQ. I have had many porcini pastas in town and this was definitely the best.

4. Pintxo. Basque Tapas. The pintxos are smaller than regular tapas but beautifully presented. Everyone ordered a few plus a main dish. I got the vegetarian option (not on the menu) which included an excellent risotto and four vegetarian pintxos. This place might have been #3 except that it I accidentally ate a snail when one of the servers told us that the mushroom dish was vegetarian when it wasn’t (I’m sure he was either new or clueless and not malicious). On the upside, I’m not sure I would have known that I’d eaten a snail if I hadn’t been told by our main server. I just thought the mushrooms had an added weird texture, as mushrooms do. Chalk it up to experience. Now I know what snails are like. This place has the exquisite presentation of #s 1 and 2 above if you like your meals a little showy. It turned out to be a little less expensive, too.

5. Bistro Laloux. Definitely on my “not getting my money again” list. I called ahead to see if they do anything for vegetarians, they said yes. I arrive, and seeing nothing on the menu, alert my server that I’m the vegetarian they were warned about. The appetizer with yellow beets was delightful, but the main dish was pasta with vegetables and way too much oil. To add insult to insult (no injury was incurred), the meaty pasta dish contained truffles, but my veggie version did not. I didn’t notice a discount on the bill. I thought maybe my carnivore companions liked it better but the responses were lukewarm rather than ecstatic. Given that they were rude to me in 2005 when we went there with Lev Manovich (I’d forgotten that part until I got there), it’s off my list for good.

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Honorable mention: the cafe at the Musée McCord. As chair, I took candidates there instead of the faculty club for the “lunch with the chair.” Why? Because the culinary world of the faculty club is the world of soft food of a bygone age, when steam tables reigned supreme and vegetarian cookbooks were handwritten, passed down from hippie to hippie, and had titles like TOFU! Miracle food of the East!. The McCord cafe was much nicer, the candidates liked it, and everyone was well-cared for. I wouldn’t be a regular otherwise (there are more fun and less fancy options downtown) but it’s good enough. That said, the faculty club is a charming building and certainly worth showing off for the architecture. And of course, the meal can be charged directly to a departmental account.

Special thanks to the existence of consumer credit. A colleague heard I was doing a search and said “I hope you have lots of room on your credit card. You’re going to need it.” Good lord was he right. Here’s to hoping the reimbursement comes through in time!

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I am so done with fine dining for awhile. My preferences normally run much more towards ethnic, which is a few steps down the cost ladder.

Can “owl of Minerva” be used as a verb?

Today, I put something approximating finishing touches on an essay that’s been on the backburner for too long, since I had never promised it to anyone and never set a deadline for myself. It about the circulation of recordings of Osama bin Laden’s voice in the western (mostly U.S.) media and I’ve been working on it on and off since 2004. I finally sent it off last spring and now tt’s accepted for publication in Social Text and should appear in winter 2009. Here’s the thing: the essay was originally written in terms of “the present” but the “present” is so stretched out that it is no longer present but past. I wrote a footnote to try and wrap my head around it:

A few words on method are warranted here. […] I began collecting press coverage of bin Laden’s tapes in 2003, and gave my first talk on the subject in 2004. In subsequent revisions of the paper, the quantity of primary source material has declined as it is quite repetitive. For simplicity’s sake, I focused on the November 2002 tape because it was used in the run-up to the second Iraq war, because it was the subject of some controversy and because it was in many ways typical of tapes that appeared before and since. However, because drafts and revisions of the paper have essentially spanned the second Bush administration (indeed, this essay will likely appear in print only after the next U.S. president assumes the office, though I suspect that the next administration will not be so different in how it deals with bin Laden tapes, whatever its foreign policy), there is a bit of a mix between present and past tense in the wording. I have decided to allow some of the present-past tense conflicts remain in the writing, since I would otherwise be writing in a past tense to refer to things which are not yet over (which feels strange to do), even though they may well be in the past by the time you read this endnote. Such is the dilemma of cultural studies: the pace of writing and publishing is often slow enough that critiques of present conditions only appear once the present has receded into the past. Though a variety of alternatives to “traditional” scholarly outlets have appeared in recent years, the problem is constitutional and not simply technological, since it is more an issue of scholarly production than circulation.

Needed: TV Recommendations

In a couple weeks Carrie and I will be in Mexico for a much needed vacation for a week. We will spend our days in the sun by the pool or listening to the ocean, and our nights watching TV on DVD (or off BitTorrent). Okay, there will also probably be tourism and shopping. What we need now are some recommendations for good shows we might have missed. So far we’ve got Season Ones of Friday Night Lights and 30 Rock. We know and love the usual HBO shows and their relatives. We’re going to try and score season 4 of The 4400 (my bT is a little slow these days and I don’t have time to troubleshoot), but we could use one or two more (in case of a rainy day).

Suggestions? I suspect I’m asking the wrong crowd (except for Steven) but it’s always worth a shot. For instance, is The Dead Zone actually any good?

Interview Flashback

A student for whom I write recommendations has landed an interview at a doctorate-granting institution. In discussing the differences between this arrangement and others, it brought me back to my first time I had to emotionally confront the idea that I might one day supervise graduate students.

I was on an interview at Michigan Tech in the Humanities department in January 1999. I was ABD but had submitted the thesis to the cte in the fall and had scheduled a February defense date because that’s when all my cte members would be in town. So I was almost out of grad school but not quite. I don’t remember the day’s schedule exactly but there was a point where it was time to go meet with the grad students. So I went and met with the students. The faculty dropped me off, the door closed in the lounge, and there I was with a bunch of students who looked at me as someone who might be able to teach them something. Or not, as the case may be. My first response was probably something resembling abject horror. After all, I was still a grad student but they were looking at me like a faculty member. It seemed somehow off. But the adrenaline eventually turned into a positive rush. I did what any candidate or campus visitor should do when confronted with graduate students: I asked them about their work. We proceeded to have fascinating conversations and I felt challenged and stimulated and thought afterward that this whole supervising grad students thing would be pretty cool.

There’s probably just a touch of that abject horror every term when I walk into a class for the first time, but that’s okay. It helps me keep my edge.

Excerpt from Mitt Romny’s Concession Speech Translated into Leet

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I have no idea why I find that so funny. I was trying to explain leet and lolcat to a friend this weekend and stumbled upon a number of automatic translators. This one is at http://www.kfdev.com/development/javascript/leettrans.htm

This Week I Accidentally Met a Student Life Professional

Oso Raro has an awesome post about the gap between faculty and student life professionals here. It comes at a good time because this week I had a rare encounter with that side of the university. I got an email last Friday that so-and-so, head of some series of services [1], wanted to meet with me about room use. It was all very vague but I figured that as department chair, it’s a good idea to take meetings with people from other parts of my university when asked. This Wednesday I headed up to the Student Services Building, a very nice and very large building which I had never even entered or noticed for that matter, despite the fact that I pass by it about once a week if not more (it’s on the way from my office to Thomson House, the grad student union). The building looks great, which is probably important since parents need to feel like the university’s in good shape when they enter it and students need to feel like the place cares when they have a problem. I headed up to the Dean of Students office, where my colleague was located, and marveled at all the things that go on in the building about which I know absolutely nothing, but which I remember as being important from my undergrad days.

The meeting involved the possibility of using some space adjacent to the space being used by my department in a new annex (this part isn’t very interesting but it was also very quick). My colleague apologized for calling me over for a meeting “oh my god, I could have just picked up the phone, I’m sure you’re very busy. I’m sorry for wasting your time.” But of course then we got to talking. She’s new to the university and very quickly we identified that we cared about some of the same things in terms of how the institution works and how it might change. I was struck at that moment that progressive faculty probably have a whole group of allies in this other wing of the university of whom we don’t even know to avail ourselves. Having once worked in academic advising, I, at least, should know better.